Solved Disk full /var/mail/root at 73GB

P

perkypork

I have been running a couple of FreeBSD servers in production for approximately a year. They run a number of Jails and this morning I got an alert to say the hard drive was close to capacity. At first I couldn't work out how they could be at capacity, everything runs in jails and they are simple jails at that. Then I found that /var/mail/root was 73GB. I am a bit perplexed as to how it could get so big. Could anyone tell me how this could happen and how I can stop this from happening in the future please?
 
Every night, there are multiple status report emails to root. They build up if not read and deleted.

To solve it, redirect root mail to a real mail address that is read. See /etc/mail/aliases and newaliases(1).
 
That would be around 200MB of emails every day.

I am not so sure the status reports are the problem here, maybe someone put that root account on some spam lists?
 
I would like to think that but the firewall only allows an extremely small number of ports none of which are incoming mail ports.

I might configure the server to send email to an account and take a look at the messages.
 
I fear you will have to do an awful lot of reading - if these are all legitimate mails. :)
 
Crivens said:
That would be around 200MB of emails every day.

I am not so sure the status reports are the problem here, maybe someone put that root account on some spam lists?
Click to expand...

Could be non-base applications sending reports, too. Maybe reports with large binary attachments.
 
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